September 16, 2011

Online Storage for Recording Projects

For the last 6 months my band, Fluorescent Echo, has been busy working on our new EP. We are in the final stages of mixing and are almost ready to hand our new songs off for mastering. All of the mixing has been done in my home studio, thus all of the files are on hard drives in my studio. I didn't think this was a problem until this weekend. On Labor Day weekend our neighborhood was evacuated due to brush fires which destroyed 25 homes and damaged 30. Before we knew the exact location of the fire I had to get comfortable with the possibility of losing all the work we had put into the album. Luckily the fire was contained enough on Labor Day and we were allowed to go back home. However this close call made me realize that I need to think about a better way to store our work. I spent a few hours today researching free options for cloud storage. For those of you not familiar with the concept you can catch the Wikipedia definition here.

I need to find a solution that allows for enough storage to store all of our recording sessions and mixes until I we have finished the album and I can archive them. I have the following requirements:

Space: Audio .wav files can be big. Currently our album folder is coming in at about 20GB.

Reliability: We want to know that the company hosting the files will still be there tomorrow.

Budget: Free if possible.

File Sharing: we want to be able to make these files available to all band members

Security: While this isn't overly sensitive data, I don't necessarily want other people messing with our work in progress.